RE: Basic Income must be global or it will fail.
I think you'll find plenty of people who'd be perfectly fine with the original 1300
No doubt. But is that bad? We have those in today's welfare systems already. And it's a minority. The majority is trying to find a way to get more. We have mandatory jobs that pay 1€/h for welfare recipients here in Germany. While some do complain about that "wage", most are happy that they got something to do and appreciate the 200€/month they have more. I'm opposed to those measure, but only because government forces people to do them. (Great jobs, really. One I attended in Hamburg in my twens consisted of two groups. One drilled holes in a wall, the other filled them and painted the wall. Next day we switched. Another one was a 2-week seminar on how to write job applications, with role-playing-games and glueing spaghetti onto pieces of paper.)
And there's still those working for less or the same. This group has been growing steadily here, we'll have to see how the new minimum wage influences that number, I guess most in that group are on part-time for one or another reason anyway.
Minimum wages have side effects on higher qualified jobs though (now that guy gets the same as I do? I demand a raise!).
A basic income would level the field for all of them, and allow employers to pay for what the work is worth instead of what the worker needs to survive.
Interesting perspective. I disagree with the idea that employers pay their employees based on what their work is worth. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the point you were trying to make, but the productivity of american workers has tripled in the last 30 years, yet the employee has benefited almost nothing from that. Our work has certainly become more valuable. It has more to do with supply and demand, which is the whole purpose of requiring a minimum wage . Its only a matter of time before automation floods the supply side of the job market, driving wages down, which has nothing to do with the utility they provide to their employer.
But as you mentioned, is it such a bad thing, as long as we are guaranteed basic income? I think it certainly could be if it causes the wealth gap to continue to explode at the rate that it currently. Human beings strive for purpose, I think most people do indeed want to work, but it is pretty demoralizing if you don't even get a small fraction of the fruits of your labor
While there are a lot of good-guy employers which care about the situation of their employees, the big businesses dominate the markets and force those wages.
But why do employees accept them? Only because they're forced to. You're not free to value your own work, take what you're offered or be a dirty welfare sucker.
While a basic income doesn't solve this by itself, it offers a great possibility to change the mindset of the workers. When they're not just working to feed their kids and pay the state, they could have a chance to start fulfilling their own dreams. That's when people become their best anyway. It could even result in an entrepeneurial spirit which makes it hard to find regular employees unless you pay them very well.